I especially like to work on LARGE things that have substantial effects on the rooms in which they're placed. Lofts and room dividers are like this. Nowadays we're substantially under the sway of photography, and I like to give you at least a hint of what my works "look like". But there's a problem with photographing big constructs in rooms: you can't back away from them to get the appropriate perspective to render them as objects. Indeed, we experience them not so much as objects, but as environments. It becomes impossible to portray them in the standard photographic way.
I've been greatly privileged to catch the interest of Oakland-based photographer and photo-montage artist Ted Harris, who's created the images you see on my Lofts page. He's photographed the lofts from many slightly-different positions and angles, then created beautiful large montages by cutting up and re-assembling the prints.
(I scanned and Photoshopped his pieces, which does them at best a justice most rough, to get the illustrations on my website.)
Because the images are assembled from different viewpoints, the appearance of geometric elements is not always what we'd expect: sometimes long boards show up with several parts at angles, rather than as simple straight lines. Distortion? Or a better portrayal of the physical actuality of seeing, in which you do in fact move from position to position, putting together in your mind the different snapshots you get with your eyes?
Interested in the modern cult of photography and its deformation of experienced reality? See how we've moved on from the day when Foucault said "The medical gaze is constitutive of the medical body."? Get in touch with me; let's talk...
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